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Hey! Long time no see… It’s about time to revive this blog and show some of the latest things I’ve been doing. Here are two drawings from a short story I illustrated for an Easter issue of a children’s magazine.

I got the magazine sent to me, and I have to say that the vivid color scheme I used looked very nice in print! I’m quite happy about that.

I made some comics on Sunday, February 1st… and so did a lot of other people. If you’re wondering why, you can read about Hourly Comic Day here (not to be confused with 24 Hour Comic Day, which is also explained). In short, everyone goes about their day as usual, and every hour they document something that happened during that hour in one or more comic panels. Sarah McIntyre (illustrator and writer) also wrote about HCD here, and she provides some great examples of her own hourly comics.

If there’s one thing to earn from doing this annual “experiment”, it’s the sense of community one gets from participating. As an added bonus, there’s a lot of fun hourly comics to read, especially on Twitter with the hashtag #HourlyComicDay.

Sadly, I had to cheat a little bit with the timestamps on my comics, since I discovered today that I actually had skipped some of the hours. I had also left a panel blank, so I split that in two and drew those digitally. I also inked most of the comic yesterday and today, so I can’t say that I made all this in one day. Still, I’ve improved since last year (2014), and the year before (2013).

Anyway, enjoy! And please leave a comment with a link to your own hourly comics if you made some (ok, you don’t have to… but it would be awesome if you did).

Whether the quote is true or not, this was something that stuck with me after I had watched the first episode of Topic Town. Topic Town is an ongoing video series and talkshow created by Craig Benzine (also known as Wheezywaiter) and Matt Weber. In each episode, the two guys spend somewhere around ten minutes talking about a more-or-less random topic. It’s currently hosted on The Good Stuff on YouTube.

I drew this using screengrabs from the first video and tracing paper. The text is lettered by hand, based on Helvetica Neue UltraLight and Thin Italic. After coloring the drawing with some of Kyle’s watercolor brushes, I animated it and tweeted the final product to @wheezywaiter. It so happened that he immediately started using the drawing as a logo (or intro graphic) for the show. This, of course, makes me a happy artist!

Oh, and here’s the latest installment of Topic Town…well, at least at the time I’m posting this.

It’s been a long time since I drew a journal comic. This one is about the benefits of having a thick beard (I usually keep it short). The beard won’t be around for long though… The girlfriend does not approve, so I’ve promised to trim it before the end of this month.

I drew this simple recipe a good while ago, and I decided to finally post it here on my blog. Camembert (or brie) on crispbread is one of my favorite snackfoods, and it’s really simple to make.

The drawing itself is inspired by Lucy Knisley’s style of illustrating food and recipes. You can check out a few of her favorite recipes on snacklove.tumblr.com. However, that blog seems to be somewhat abandoned, as it was geared specifically towards the April 2013 release of Knisley’s book, Relish. You’ll find more of Knisley’s wonderful art on her website: lucyknisley.com.

Digital inkingMid-way in the comics project I’ve been doing, I started doing the inking digitally. This happened while working on the fourth four-page comic. I had discovered Kyle’s brushes, and I have since invested in a vast collection of his digital brushes. The brushes are capable of imitating a wide selection of traditional media, and it has been a lot of fun to try them out.

I would still start with a pencil drawing, and then scan it at a very high dpi. At the time, I thought that working with a high dpi (somewhere between 340-350 dpi) would make the art look good. But the result was probably the opposite, as I had a tendency to zoom in a lot and add details that would be too small to make sense in print.

This is one of a few things I learned about digital inking. I also found out that what worked best for me was to find two brushes that work well together, and stick with only those two. In the end, I worked with one called Clean Comics on the characters and foreground, which in my opinion needed clean edges and a reasonable amount of line variation. I tried to draw most of the background with a less “flexible” brush named Comics Tech Pen 12px (Clean Comics and Comics Tech Pen 12px are both Kyle T. Webster’s brushes).

Now, there are a few stylistic differences between my first comic and the final comic I did. Doing this project has been a learning process for me, and I can’t deny that my drawing style has evolved a bit while working on the comics. Just look at these panels, the first one from the first comic and the second from the seventh.

(Side note: The first panel of the comics usually had this gang of kids walking along the street, setting the season and the mood of the weather.)

Let me just say that I like working hands-on with the traditional process I mentioned in the previous post. I also have to mention that I personally feel it’s easier to draw and sketch loosely with a pencil and paper. And last, but not least, a pretty detailed pencil drawing was required for me to have something to work with when inking digitally. But all in all, I think I saved some time by eliminating the traditional inking step. Also, I could easily listen to a podcast or have an episode of a TV-show running in the background while working on my big iMac screen… Which in turn made the tedious task a bit easier.